


Teach Us To Care And Not To Care

by actonbell



Category: The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The X-Files
Genre: Background Clarice Starling/Ardelia Mapp, Crossover, F/F, Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-05-01 04:43:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5192765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actonbell/pseuds/actonbell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wrote this way back in 2008, when I couldn't find any fic where Clarice Starling met Dana Scully (who clearly seemed inspired by her). I really wanted them to meet (and talk about something other than Hannibal. Or Mulder).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teach Us To Care And Not To Care

_Because these wings are no longer wings to fly_  
_But merely vans to beat the air_  
_The air which is now thoroughly small and dry_  
_Smaller and dryer than the will_  
_Teach us to care and not to care_  
_Teach us to sit still_

\-- T.S. Eliot, "Ash-Wednesday," _Four Quartets_

 

After the third guy in a row, in the space of forty-five minutes, had hit on her, Scully escaped to the one place in the Arlington hotel besides her room that seemed inviolate, at least for a few minutes: the big women's room just off the lobby. It had a pleasant carpeted anteroom with "flattering" too-low lighting, a mirror that covered nearly half the wall, and, directly under the mirror, a couch flanked by two conversational-groupings of matching stuffed chairs. Three women had dragged the chairs over by one end of the couch so they could all see each other's faces while talking intently over their takeout salads. Scully had been an eavesdropper since she was a preteen listening in on Missy and Billy as if they were K-SIB radio stations, and she slowed down to catch a moment of chat: " -- she was at the [WIFLE](http://www.wifle.org/) golf tournament last month too," one of them was saying, "and the donations for the intern scholarship -- " She glanced up at Scully just briefly, just a registering of her presence, and Scully smiled before moving on, not wanting to get caught up in either personal gossip or shop talk. She couldn't decide if she was taken aback by or slightly jealous of women networking _in the restroom,_ but after all, if there were still going to be segregated men's clubs, de facto if not openly....She shrugged mentally, escaping from it all into the bathroom.

Here the light was still "flattering" -- i.e., slightly pink-tinted, which gave a weird sheen to Scully's hair -- but at least direct, the (full and working) dispensers held scented and creamy liquid soap, and there were hot-air-blowing hand-dryers and old-fashioned cloth rolling towels (Scully raised an eyebrow) instead of ubiquitous hunks of rough brown paper. Scully had been surprised the conference had been scheduled in this nice a hotel, and cynically wondered if it had been some kind of a sop. She was still wary, even here, of discussing the lack of promotions, salary equity, discrimination....And besides, there were more men here than she'd thought. Mulder was uninterested in conferences of any kind, but he'd muttered something about the stupidity of trying to change the system from within before she left that almost made her stop in the doorway and pick a fight, but they'd been on edge with each other ever since Philadelphia _(This work is my life! -- And it's become mine....)_ and she didn't want it to get worse. So she'd swallowed her anger and pretended she was too dignified to rise to such obvious bait, and left with an excessively polite goodbye.

She had to admit, she herself was wondering what the hell she was doing here. She'd attended some panels and presentations and done her share of card-exchanging, but she hadn't really connected with anyone -- she hadn't even gone along on the group visit to the new [Women In Military Service For America Memorial,](http://www.womensmemorial.org/) or just taken advantage of being able to talk with colleagues about the [Terry Collection](http://anthropology.si.edu/cm/terry.htm) or _California v Marx_ without being thought weird or, at best, morbid. _This is my life._ Then why was she spending her nights here so far the way she would have at home -- in a warm thick robe with a copy of _Blood Review_ in --

She curled an arm up awkwardly behind her back, scowling. The damned tattoo had started itching in the shower this morning; she'd blamed it on the prepackaged hotel soap, but all the old internal arguments about having it removed had resurfaced. _You don't know the long-term effects of that ink -- you should get another chemical analysis, make sure it's not toxic --_ and the almost-unvoiced _Look at what it led to...._ She sighed, angry. _And if I stay home every night and go to bed in a flannel nightie before ten PM nothing bad will ever happen to me again?_ she asked herself sardonically. She knew the tattoo really was a Symbol of impulsiveness, not repeating patterns or infinite recursion. She knew Missy -- who'd pierced her sister's ears with an ice cube and a needle dipped in alcohol, to their mother's chagrin -- would whole-heartedly approve _(About goddamn time, Dana!)_ , which was always the sign of a truly terrible idea.

But Missy was....gone, for good, and it felt disloyal or worse to think of any of her ideas as terrible, even if they always were. Scully was hit by a sudden regret that Missy would never spot the tattoo when she was changing or swimming (she wouldn't dare tell her -- Missy had never known how to keep secrets, and had a bad habit of blurting out her sister's, such as they were, in front of their mother), never ask her when and where and how she'd had it done, never pry for details about Ed and what had happened to him....Come to think of it, Ed was a lot more like the men Missy had preferred than any of the (older, authority figure) men Scully had gone for -- _That's because you have a daddy complex, Dana,_ Missy would say with infuriating smugness. Would have said. They had both had equal and opposing reactions to the regulations that surrounded their upbringing -- the Church, the military, school, their father's discipline....Scully had conformed as closely as she could, while Missy had rebelled equally predictably.

Just as Scully bit her lower lip hard enough that she could focus on the sharp physical pain instead of the dully tearing mental one, a woman came in -- the click of her heels just barely alerting Scully, who turned both taps on full and began to vigorously overscrub her hands, even by doctors' standards. She glanced up automatically herself, just as the woman in the outer room had, and then stood still, letting the water run over her fingers. FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling caught Scully's eye in the mirror, then went on looking, seeing the younger woman's strained expression and pallor, even under the rosy lighting.

Scully gaped for a moment. There were still few enough women in the FBI, and the Buffalo Bill case had been recent and outrageous enough, that every female recruit she knew -- including herself -- had imprinted on it. And now here was the woman who'd taken down Mr Hyde alone, at night, by herself, _in a basement_ that was a torture chamber, with no backup, nothing other than her own guts and wits and weapons. In front of her. Starling had tracked him down, finished him off, saved the hostage -- a Senator's daughter, Scully remembered, every detail clear -- stopped his killing. For good. Even the men who said dismissively she'd probably had an earpiece directing her what to do the whole time, or that she'd really had backup and the FBI had put out the story because they were low on female recruits, or even pettier put-downs, were impressed. Scully had just seen Starling give a presentation the other day -- Starling's presence more than half the reason why Scully had gone to the conference at all -- on a study which showed hand strength in female law enforcement officers tested as good as or better than their male counterparts after they had taken a specialized training course designed by Starling and the agent who had taught her to shoot, but she was still speechless. _Living legend._ She wanted to be swallowed up by the cool clean tile floor. She would rather be caught losing her shit by J. Edgar Himself than Clarice Starling.

Clarice Starling's gaze dropped to Scully's hands, motionless under the pounding stream of water, then flicked back up. She reached over and gently shut off both taps, her eyes never leaving Scully's in the mirror. "You okay?" she asked, her low voice sounding just as clearly as it had through the microphone yesterday, only quieter -- rich and warm like good coffee. You could hear West Virginia, just barely, if you knew and listened hard. "You look a little....peaked," she said, shrugging and smiling all at once, and Scully remembered her background had shown itself more in occasional slips of vocabulary than any inflection or tone.

If it had been anybody else, Scully would have automatically put on her game face and said she was fine with her usual glassy bravery, but she couldn't -- not here, not to this woman. "I'm fine, thank you," she said anyway, but didn't bother trying to cover up that it was a lie -- and Starling didn't call her on it, letting her have her dignity. "Well, no. I just...." She shrugged herself. "Special Agent Dana Scully," she said almost formally, trying to recall herself with her title, her name, her role. The backs of her eyes felt hot, as if she were a teenager again during one of her father's surprise inspections. She didn't offer her still-wet hand.

"Special Agent Clarice Starling," Special Agent Clarice Starling said gravely, but with a flicker of something -- humour? -- too, as if they were little girls at a make-believe tea party introducing their dolls. She studied Scully, not smiling but with a strange regard. "You asked me a question yesterday."

"Oh -- that! Oh...." After Starling's presentation, there had been a larger-than-usual group of confrontational male questioners, and the questions seemed harsher to Scully than outright angry challenges she'd heard at other presentations -- presentations that had been given by men or non-threatening women or women who at least had the good sense not to tell a roomful of macho law-enforcement officials that not only could you get some girl cadets to jack up their trigger-pulling strength to the extent that you couldn't use it as a reason to kick them out, the numbers seemed to track that after a certain point the women were _better_ at it -- much better -- than their male counterparts who hadn't had the training. After one particular question that was nearly a flat-out insult, Scully had put her hand up, then stood and asked Starling sweetly whether it was three or four years running she had been the _open_ (as opposed to the _women's,_ she did not say) interservice combat pistol champion? A low-level chuckle had run around the edges of the room, spreading and rippling like water, and Starling had relaxed and grinned and said, "Just three -- but I'm going to try for four in a few months," and Scully had thanked her and sat back down, flush with victory.

"I just -- it just gets a little rough out there," she explained, meaning the seminar, the conference, the FBI. The world. _No shit Starbuck._ "I don't mean you couldn't handle it," she said hastily, wishing again she could just disappear -- be taken away by one of Mulder's grays or the animate protoplasm he'd been going on about lately. Too late she realized she'd emphasized the wrong word. "I can handle it, too, we all can," she said, which made Starling smile. "Just...." She paused, then realized she didn't have words for what she wanted to say, and gave an apologetic shrug. Mercifully, Starling hadn't turned to face her, but was still scrutinizing her in the mirror.

"Oh, I know we can handle it," Starling said in a disorientingly cheerful tone. "Otherwise we wouldn't be here" -- meaning the seminar, the conference, the FBI, even the world. She held Scully's gaze. "The man who recruited me taught me to handle it. He asked me how cold liquid nitrogen was, if I'd used it to freeze things." She didn't explain, one ex-lab rat talking to another; Scully nodded. "He told me to freeze it -- everything but the information, the facts. Freeze the feelings. Take them out later, or maybe not at all. Not for a long time. That's how you handle it."

"Yes," Scully said, low, almost a whisper, looking back at Starling's reflected eyes. She thought of the cold metal in the morgue, the way she'd been taught to detach herself from the bodies -- the _evidence_ \-- on the slab, the freezer; her own mentor had told her something similar. It was an obvious metaphor. _Put it on ice and lock it away._

"That's not the problem," Clarice Starling said.

"No," Scully agreed.

"The problem is," Starling went on, "when you freeze it, it lasts forever. Like that Iceman, a while back?" She tilted her chin up, head back and to the side slightly, still watching Scully, waiting.

Scully had always been good at gaining approval, advancing relentlessly on merit. "Five thousand and three hundred years," she said obediently, ever the top student, waiting for the punchline she'd just set up.

"You don't have that long." Starling grinned, a real grin, showing one slightly crooked incisor fully; you had to be close to her to see it, like the individual grains of burnt powder from the monster's revolver that made the small regular beauty mark high on one cheek. Scully had to smile back. "I didn't see you in the meet-and-greet afterwards -- I wanted to pay you back for helping me out, buy you a drink or a coffee or something. My partner's waiting for me in the bar, she got burnt out on ballistics seminars -- if you want to join us I know she'd like to meet you."

Scully immediately wanted to so much she knew she shouldn't. "That sounds -- but I do have a lot to catch up on...." she said, almost shyly.

Starling shrugged. "So do we all." She waited a moment more, obviously not wanting Scully to slip away easily but not entreating, either. Scully liked it -- the way she liked Starling, not just as a professional role model or a living legend, but a person, somebody else who'd been the only girl in the room during an autopsy, the one _doing_ the autopsy while simultaneously being the only girl in the room, who knew what it was like to be a lab flunky, who wore _L'Air de Temps._ Afraid she'd waited too long to answer, that Starling would turn away, she blurted, "Okay!" too loudly and laughed at herself, blushing. Starling laughed too, but gently. Scully pressed her lips together hard for a moment, looking at herself in the mirror one more time, then caught Clarice's eyes in her reflection again. "Okay," she repeated, more softly, as if it were something momentous. "I'd love to."

She turned and faced Starling, holding out her hand, almost formally, shy again: "Thank you. For everything," she said a bit stiltedly, but with real feeling.

Starling smiled and shook her head again, but took Scully's hand briefly, in a firm but momentary clasp.

"Let's go," she said.

**Author's Note:**

> The timing on this is fudged a little bit -- _Silence_ was published in about 1988, and Starling's 25 then; the birthdate I found for her at the time was December 23, 1957 (Scully's birthday is February 23, 1964). This is in an alternate timeline where after "Never Again" Scully DIDN'T get cancer and, needless to say, Starling didn't dump Ardelia to run off with a cannibalistic serial killer, either. So this takes place in around 1995 in a universe three feet to the left.


End file.
